Section 18

6 Cp. the more concrete three Magi motive. It should, however, be noted that Origen (1st half of 3rd cent.) is the first of the Fathers to state that the number of the Magi was 3; Chrysostom, 150 years later, gives their number as 12 (see Lynn Thorndike, A History of Magic and Experimental Science London, 1923, i. 472ff.). p. 36 1 Merkabah; here presumably meaning heaven generally. 2 The narrative is largely in the familiar style of Danielic and Talmūdic chronological camouflage; the Daniel Book ( c . 164 B.C.) throws back the religio-political conflict of the Jews with the kingdorn and Hellenistic religion of Antiochus Epiphanes to the days of Nebuchhadnezzar ( c . 600 B.C.), and the Talmūd Jesus stories, for instance, throw back the setting to some 100 years B.C. or advance it to some 100 years A.D. See my Did Jesus Live 100 B.C.?—An Enquiry into the Talmūd-Jesus Stories, the Toldoth Jushu and Some Curious Statements of Epiphanius—Being a Contribution to the Study of Christian Origins (London, 1903). It is to be noted that the Talmūd knows nothing of John; it evidently regards the John-Jesus movement as one and the same kind of heresy. Y. and B. may perhaps be personified types of members of certain contemporary communities or mystical groups. In §54 Y. and B. are called the 'Two Gold-sons.' This reminds us of alchemical symbolism; see my tracing of 'psychical' alchemy to Babylon in The Doctrine of the Subtle Body in Western Tradition (London, 1919), Proem, pp. 25ff. They may have belonged to the early 'Sons of the Sun' tradition—the later Sampsćans of Epiphanius, still later in wider distribution known to the Moslim historians as Shemsīyeh (Shamish = the Sun). This hypothesis is strengthened by the apparently cryptic gloss Beni-Amin, 'Sons of (the) Amēn' (cp. Rev. iii. 14: These things saith the Amēn, the faithful and true witness, the beginning of the creation of God."). I have no space here to follow up this conjecture; but L. seems to me to be, not only nodding, but fast asleep, when he assumes that the Mandćan writers were simply ignoramuses who mistook Ben-Yamin for Beni-Amin. The Heb. derivation of Benjamin is given very variously In the Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the O.T. L. refers to Yaqif (clearly Jacob) as Joseph. 3 Of whom we have no further information.